Kevin Kincaid
Game Designer & 3D Artist
Snowy Station Cinematic
April 2022 -
June 2022
Scene Created in Unreal
All Visual Assets created by Kevin Kincaid
Snowy Station Cinematic is a short video rendered in Unreal. It depicts a magical train waiting at a snow-covered train station. The project was meant to emulate a video game art style. My main artistic inspiration was Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which has a mix of detailed, stylized realism textures contrasted with abstract models.
Snowy Station Cinematic was created for an Art direction class at Savannah College of Art and Design. The class examines practices for being a successful art lead. I created every visual aspect of this scene. I modeled every mesh, created every material in Substance Designer, and applied all materials in Painter. The sound is attributed to freesound.org. I created all particle FX in Niagara.
Complete Cinematic
Development Process
After settling on an artistic inspiration, I started working on developing the scene. I ultimate settled on created a space station.
This artwork was created by rendering a set of the models in maya, and then doing a paint-over with the color palette. It served as the main concept for the project as a whole.
Above are a few of the materials I created in Substance Designer for this project. The Unreal Materials also utilized vertex painting to add snow to elements and set the depth of snow piled upon the materials.
Element Assembly
One required milestone for the assignment required a ‘Beautiful Corner’ or a finished rendering of a section of the scene. I chose to do specifically the train station. These images represent the first full assembly of models and materials in Unreal. I was fairly happy with this out - come, but it demonstrated several areas that needed improvement, especially the snow.
After finishing the beautiful corner, I began working on creating the rest of the elements, as well as adding interest to the original train station. I redid the snow material to be less reflective, and created a material function that used the snow. I then combined it with under materials and used vertex painting to control where snow accumulated on items and how deep the snow was using height maps. The falling snow was a particle effect initially created for my Particle FX Zone project and adapted for here.
